Grant Kanoho rested on a makeshift bed Tuesday under a white tent near the entrance of the Best Buy in Aiea.

He was part of a group of 10 friends who continued their annual tradition of camping at Hawaii’s last big-box electronics retailer to be the first in line Thursday for deep discounts. The group has been doing Black Fridays together for the past decade but in recent years has turned the shopping trips into overnighters — this year starting at 11 a.m. Monday.

“It’s more about the tradition now than it is about the actual sales because you can buy so much of the stuff online, but we’ve been doing this for so long now,” said the 39-year-old Aiea resident. “So much of us kind of see this as the start of the holidays, so it’s fun. It’s actually like tailgating for four days with your friends.”

Kanoho’s “shift” ended at 4 p.m. when a friend took his place to save their spot in line. He planned to rejoin the group Tuesday night after taking his 10-year-old daughter to karate, eating dinner with his family and putting his three kids to bed, including a 5- and 2-year old.

“From the outside looking in, I can see why people say it’s crazy. But we’re not here 24/7, so it makes it manageable,” Kanoho said. “When we started, it was about the products mostly ’cause we were younger. It was more about what we could get for ourselves. Nowadays as we’re all getting older … it’s become less important, I think, for us to get the stuff. It’s more the fellowship — that trumps everything, honestly. We’re still all home for Thanksgiving dinner.”

His children will join in the fellowship Wednesday night as the group barbecues and plays football and other games after hours in the empty parking lot and “talks story” to pass the time.

The group has built a good relationship with the electronics retailer’s employees, who welcome them each year.

“We do whatever we can to take care of them,” said Ricci Caracol, assistant store manager at Best Buy, who expects at least 10 percent more foot traffic this year. The store brought in 100 to 200 more TVs than last year and expanded new product offerings. “We’re expanding on a lot of our smart home products and toys, which we never carried before, so we’re hoping and thinking a lot more customers are going to come in looking for those things specifically. Obviously, being one of the last standing electronics stores here, we are in a good place. We’re set up to win.”

Other retailers, like Walmart, are also expecting to attract more customers with deeper discounts and more products than in previous years, said Ray Griego, a manager at the Fort Street Mall location.

“There’s more available goods this year. Every year we buy up more. Every single store is loaded deep with a lot of great items.”

The retail giant has gone one step further to make it more convenient for shoppers on the busiest day of the year.

For the first year, consumers can download the Walmart app to see exactly where items are in the store they will be shopping at on Black Friday. The store also will put up color-coded balloons to make it easier for customers to find items and place employees with hand-held register devices in each department so customers don’t have to wait in long checkout lines.

“We’re enhancing the technology to make the shopping so much easier this year,” said Griego of the sale that starts at 6 p.m. Thursday. Black Friday sale items, except for DVDs, are available on Walmart.com starting Wednesday at 5 p.m. “It’s one more way to make the Black Friday shopping experience much more enjoyable. It’ll definitely cut down on wait time for customers ready to go back to their families or start gift wrapping right away.”

Sales are expected to outpace last year with “more than enough product to satisfy as many customers as possible this Thursday.”

Hawaii retailers are anticipating greater holiday sales with the uptick in the economy and projected higher consumer spending. The National Retail Federation estimates 164 million consumers will shop from Thanksgiving through Monday.

“Every year is amazing because we always seem to outdo the year before by offering more merchandise at deeper discounts,” he said. “I do expect a lot more customers at our stores and stores throughout the islands.”